My deepest gratitude to you all for all the expressions of sympathy, condolence, and wisdom that I have received. As the Buddha noted in his teaching of the mustard seed*, there isn’t a household that has escaped loss. My loss resonates because of all the other losses each of us has known and lived through. Thank you for your abiding compassion and beautiful hearts.
In the past year or so, I have been drawn to the Clear Mountain Monastery community and their two young founding ajahns - Ajahn Nisabho and Ajahn Kovilo - often attending their morning meditations via zoom. These two young monks trained in the Thai Forest Tradition of Ajahn Chah and decided to form a monastery in Seattle. For the past five years they and their growing community of practitioners have met in a welcoming Christian church on Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings and utilized zoom and YouTube for many connecting events. This past March with support from a growing community around the world, they found and purchased land in North Bend, Washington, 40 minutes from Seattle by car.
In September, they commemorated their transition to the land with a three-day walk that commenced at the welcoming Christian church with short talks by Bhikkuni Anandabodhi, Ajahn Kovilo, and Ajahn Nisabho. Bhikkuni Anandabodhi has been a seminal part of reviving the Bhikkuni tradition in the west - restoring the order of Buddhist nuns as a separate and equal lineage rather than as a perpetually lower order of the monasteries for men. We listened to those talks in September.
Recently, they published a short documentary on that three-day walk with their comments about their intentions for the walk and their vision for the monastery. We will watch that documentary tonight.
This desire to be closer to and more cognizant of the monastic orders and monasteries has been growing in me for some time. It has always been a tradition since the second half of the last century for Westerners to find opportunities to take robes and live in the monasteries with the monks for some period of time. Jack Kornfield spent 10 years in robes in Thailand. Many monks in the UK and Australia are Western born. And some numbers of Western women became nuns or Bhikkunis for periods of time. One of my teachers Guy Armstrong spent two months in robes in Myanmar.
I have lost a number of people in my life who I was very close to and that is one of the reasons I began to meditate and take my first steps on this path. The recent deaths of my close friend last fall and then my brother early in October were both staggering losses to me and I found I wanted some further way of practicing that acknowledged these losses more directly and helped me carry the grief. The tremendous compassion I have received from family and friends and some total strangers has been foundational for helping me bear these burdens. And my compassion and caring have helped others bear similar losses. We are none of us alone although we may allow our minds and concepts to separate us. Community is how we can find strength.
My brother called himself a Quaker Catholic. Quaker by birth, he grew up as I did in the silence of meetings for worship on Sundays with a wide variety of beliefs held in the community. He became a Catholic after or during his Peace Corps years in Costa Rica and his marriage and birth of his daughter. He remained in the Catholic church after the separation and with his second wife singing in the choir and partaking of the community of the church. In his death, he was attended by his wife, a gathering of nearby family, and a priest he had known who came, sat with them, prayed with them, and helped them absorb the shock of his rapid passing.
He had a traditional Catholic mass but his sisters requested and were able to offer a quasi-Quaker opportunity later at the reception for people to stand as the spirit moved them and relate a little of the joy he brought into our lives, the gratitude we all felt for his life and for his wife who gave him such happiness, and the sadness that lives in our hearts at his passing.
So I have been thinking about rituals and about churches and monasteries, priests and monastics. In my community, those who attend church had traditional church rituals. But many do not and for them, rituals are private, often self-organized, and sometimes almost non-existent. We send cards when we can. But often close friends don’t send each other cards. Some rejected all the rites and rituals associated with churches but still their friends organized gatherings that were reminiscent of more traditional gatherings.
And I have also been astounded by the power of death to shake our concepts of reality. The question, how did I get in here and how did you get in there is often the beginning of such questioning. How did life begin? How is this earth possible? What are the laws of gravity? What is the relationship to the number of petals on a flower to the lengths of sound waves and the overtone series in musical notes? And is there a relationship between that and the movement of the planets? Remember the recently discovered six planet system where all six planets move in a gravitational rhythm known an orbital resonance with their orbital periods locked into a fixed mathematical ratio? And more astounding, how is it that human beings developed ears and brains to hear these mathematical relationships as music, eyes to see and appreciate aspects of vision, miracles of nature? And humans and animals sometimes share appreciation for beauty as in bird plumage?
And recently, I heard a meditation from a nun at Plum Village, the center Thich Naht Hanh founded. The last line was “You are alive without boundaries. I am alive without boundaries.” We know so little of the mystery that surrounds us, that is at the center of our lives.
All Buddhist traditions share some form of chanting as do many other religious traditions. My brother’s participation in the church choir is another version - lifting the voice in resonance with others in reciting or singing the teachings. Many religions have kneeling, bowing, hands together in prayer. Some have full body prostrations. I listened to one teacher recount her need to lay her body flat on the ground in acknowledgement, in devotion to goodness, beauty, perhaps majesty, power, incomprehensibility. And often we find the word surrender to have resonance unlike almost any other.
Everyday life is often quite manageable without the words spirituality or sacred. But conception and the birth of a child often shakes that secular vision. And certainly death - our own and others - challenges us to maintain our balance. And beyond that, the intense suffering found in wars, in intentional cruelty, and in catastrophic natural events such as the one that occurred in Nepal recently, how are these life events to be held with equanimity?
Our practice is key certainly. The lessons of freedom can be found in the present moment. But our practice is stronger when it is joined by devotion and by the power of community, of sangha.
The first Buddhist chant many meditators learn is the simplest.
I go to the Buddha for refuge.
I go to the Dharma for refuge.
I go to the Sangha for refuge.
For a second time, I go to the Buddha for refuge.
For a second time, I go to the Dharma for refuge.
For a second time, I go to the Sangha for refuge.
For a third time, I go to the Buddha for refuge.
For a third time, I go to the Dharma for refuge.
For a third time, I go to the Sangha for refuge.
The Buddha said all three - the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha - were important refuges but the most important was sangha.
*A woman’s baby child dies and she carries the dead child around asking someone to help her. She is sent to the Buddha who tells her to bring him a mustard seed from a household that has not known loss. She goes from house to house seeking the mustard seed but instead is brought in to the house where she hears the story of loss that this family has sustained and they in turn hold her own loss in compassion. Eventually she has to return to the Buddha and tell him she was not able to find a household without loss from which to gather the mustard seed. But she had learned the lesson he wanted her to learn, had been heard and cared for, had shared her loss with many families who shared their losses with her. And she was able to release her child and feel supported by the community.